The Greenbrier Ghost

The story of Zona Heaster Shue's death and subsequent appearances to her mother as an apparition are often referred to as the only case in the U.S. when a ghost’s testimony convicted a murderer. But of course, there’s a lot more to the story. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
And now we're in the thick of Halloween happenings, which
means it is time for a ghost story. Who doesn't

(00:22):
love a ghost story? Although this one is problematic in
a variety of ways. You may recall an episode that
Sarah and Deblina did in twelve about London's Cocklane ghost
who accused a living person of murder that is also
going to come up as a classic uh in the
not too distant future. So if you didn't listen to
it in twelve and don't feel like looking for it,
you're going to get it automatically in your feed very soon. Uh.

(00:44):
And this one is in a similar vein, but it
is a West Virginia story of a ghost who gave
details about her murder and uh, we are about to
go on tour, as we've said so, uh, we were
considering this as as possibly one of the topics that
we would cover in one leg of our our upcoming tour,

(01:04):
but as I started doing the research on it, it
pretty quickly became apparent that this is a little too
unsettling for our no bummer's rule for live shows. Uh.
And there is are some aspects to this story that
just would not be fun bantery things to talk about
in a live show. Uh. That means this is also
your warning that this story features multiple instances of spousal abuse,

(01:26):
specifically a man abusing his wives. So if that is
something that you would rather not hear about, that is understandable,
and this one might be best to skip over. We
are talking today about the Greenbrier Ghost. It's spousal abuse
up to and potentially including murder. So yeah, it's uh
not to be a spoiler, but there's a lot going on.

(01:47):
There's a plaque which is a state historical marker that
stands near a West Virginia cemetery and tells an incredible tale.
Here's what it says. Quote Greenbrier Ghost, interred in nearby
cemetery is na houster shoe. Her death in eight was
presumed natural until her spirit appeared to her mother to
describe how she was killed by her husband. Trout autopsy

(02:11):
on the exhumed body verified the apparition's account. Trout found
guilty of murder was sentenced to the state prison. Only
known case in which testimony from ghost helped convict a murderer.
So first we are going to talk about Mr Shoe.
His full name was Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shoe, and he

(02:32):
had a problematic past long before he met Zona. When
he changed his name from Erasmus to Edward is unknown,
although it could have been connected to one of the
times he had some legal trouble, but he went by
Trout to most people. Shoe had a history of abuse,
Like we alluded to earlier, in the winter of eighteen
eighty six to eighty seven, there were stories of incidents

(02:54):
in which he had whipped his first wife, Her name
was ali Estelene cut Lip McMillan, and those stories had
spread and become so common that a number of teenagers
and their teacher decided to go do something about it.
According to an account by one of the boys involved, G. S. McKeever,
the group went to the Shoe cabin on Rock Camp Run,

(03:15):
which was an offshoot of Spring Creek, late one night
and they knocked on the door. Obviously, we should say
this account was given many many years after all of
this took place to just keep that in mind. But
when Shoe answered, several of the youths jumped him and
they took him to a watering hole and they dunked
him in the icy water. The temperature that night was
below freezing, and they told him they were doing it

(03:37):
because he was known to beat his wife. And the
next morning Shoe pressed charges against the three boys who
were his primary attackers. So there was a minor bit
of addressing the charges and bringing the first of the
defendants to court, but there were plenty of people willing
to serve as witnesses for all the young people involved.
All three warrants were abandoned by the court. Shoe's wife,

(04:00):
Ali moved back to her family home and later divorced him,
and she did that while he was incarcerated for horse theft. Yeah, basically,
when the first of the young men, who they were teenagers,
so the boys involved, went before the court, there were
like three people ready to go No, he wasn't, he
wasn't where they're saying he is. And they realized like
there was never going to be anything to come of it,

(04:21):
So that's why they dismissed all of those others. Um
I think probably also the judge knew what was up
and was like, I'm not going to punish these kids
for trying to do something right. Shoe got married again,
in this time to Lucy and Tritt, and Lucy was
only sixteen when she and Trout married. She did not
live to see seventeen. Eight months into the marriage, she
fell and died when she hit her head on a rock.

(04:44):
At least that was trout story. There was some doubt
in the community about whether that was true, but Trout
was never charged with any wrongdoing in her death, and
her death was written up in the paper as just
a sudden death. And then in the On of You
met Elva Zona Heaster, who went by Zona. Before long
they were married. Trout Shoe had only recently started working

(05:08):
in Greenbrier County and he drew a lot of attention.
He was handsome and cocky, and Zona really fell for him,
and their wedding itself was a peculiarity. When the Methodist
minister are are Little arrived at the Shoe home for
the ceremony, The bride and the guests were there, but
trout Shoe was not. He had gone to get the
marriage license, is what the minister was told, and, according

(05:31):
to an account that was given by Reverent Little again
much later after the fact, they all sat there and
waited a very long time for Trout to return. He
left them waiting from early afternoon until approximately midnight. Then
when Trout finally did get there, there was a problem
with the marriage license itself. It had been issued in
Greenbrier County, but the shoe home was located in Pocahonas County.

(05:54):
Little refused to perform the ceremony in any other county
than the one where the license had been issued. I
don't know how West Virginia law works, but that is
how the law works some places. She convinced everybody in
attendance to walk a mile down the road so that
they would be in Greenbrier County, and then the ceremony
started there on the road. So here is what happened next,

(06:17):
according to Reverend Little's account, quote, when I came to
the part of the ceremony where it says, if anyone
has objections, speak now or forever hold your peace. I waited,
and after some time I said I object I told
him for the reason that the girl he wished to
marry was a mere child. None of her people are present.

(06:38):
It is now one o'clock in the morning, and we
are all here on a country road. A marriage ceremony
is a sacred rite and should at least be performed
under ordinary circumstances. I cannot help but think there is
something not right in this case, and I will go
no further. So there will be no wedding, so far
as I am concerned. The minister said that he later

(06:58):
learned that Zonah was very young, just fifteen years old.
You'll recall that Trout's previous wife, Lucy, had only been sixteen.
It was probably not accurate, though she was probably closer
to twenty. Her exact birthdate is unknown, and different accounts
of how old she was are really all over the map. Yeah,
there are a lot of question marks surrounding Zona and

(07:22):
her personality and who she was. There are some stories
that will tell you that she had actually had a
child out of wedlock the year before, which would have
been very um scandalous at the time. The year before
she met she, others will paint a completely different picture
of her. And because there are so little records, it's
really hard to know. What is just country community gossip

(07:45):
that has spread versus what is truth, which is part
of why this story is tricky to begin with. But
we know that trout Shoe had gotten this young woman
away from her family and had rushed this wedding. And
even though Reverend Little refused to perform the ceremony, the
next morning, Trout just took Zona to another town in
Greenbrier County and they got married there. Trout and Zonah

(08:07):
were together only a couple of months, It's between two
and three months before she died. In early January of
eighteen nine seven, Zona became ill with something that's not
totally clear. The local doctor, doctor George W. Knap, called
on the Shoes to check on Zonah regularly and to
monitor her health. On January two, Trout paid a visit

(08:28):
to the home of a woman known as Aunt Martha Jones.
Martha had a son named Anderson who was eleven at
the time, and trout Shoe asked if Anderson could go
to the Shoe home and take care of some chores
for Zona. Anderson had done this kind of work for
them before, and he was told that Anderson had some
other errands that he needed to do first, but that
he would eventually make his way there, and over the

(08:50):
course of the morning, in the very early afternoon, Trout
stopped at the Jones home four different times to repeat
that request. Anderson Jones did. Eventually, I get to Trout
and Zona's home, and we'll get to the particulars of
what he found there. After we paused for a quick
sponsor break. According to an account given by Anderson Jones

(09:16):
decades later, when he was a grown man, he finally
got to the Shoe home a little after one pm,
and he felt that there was something off about the
house as he approached it, and as he got to
the porch, he said that he saw blood. He knocked
on the door, but he got no answer, and then
he tried the door, which was unlocked, and he entered
the house. He followed the trail of blood through the

(09:38):
kitchen to the door to the dining room, and as
with the exterior door, that dining room door was closed,
and he knocked and got no answer, and then he
opened the door himself. When he did this, Anderson Jones
stumbled over the body of Zona, lying face up on
the floor with her eyes open. He shook her and
found that she was cold to the touch. Immediately realized

(10:00):
she was dead. He ran from the house and yelled
to his mother as he made his way home that
Mrs Shoe was dead, and then he went onto the
blacksmith shop where Trout she worked to tell him this
terrible news about his wife. According to Anderson Jones, Shoe
ran home and he Anderson went to fetch Dr. Nap,
and by the time they got to the Shoe home

(10:21):
that meaning Anderson and the doctor, Trout had moved his
wife from the floor to the bed and dressed her
in address with a high collar and a scarf, and
was sitting on the bed cradling her body. Trout allegedly
held her head close to his chest and wasn't willing
to let go of it even as the doctor tried
to examine the body. Nap determined that Zonah had experienced

(10:44):
heart failure and said that her death was quote everlasting faint.
Zona had died on a Friday, and on Saturday, her
body was taken to her mother's home, which was on
a nearby mountain, where there was a period of visitation
before the burial on Monday, January. During the visitation, Trout
was similarly unwilling to step away from Zona or her coffin,

(11:08):
choosing to stay seated at the head of it rather
than stand to greet visitors, and any time there was
someone there, Trout was there at the coffin and allegedly
did not allow anyone to approach it. So now we
need to take a moment to talk about Zona's mother.
Her name was Mrs Mary Jane Heister, and she was
not a fan of Trout. That cause of death, recorded

(11:29):
as everlasting feint, did not sit well with her. To
Mary Heaster, that didn't sound like a valid reason for
her young, previously pretty healthy daughter to have died. And
beginning a few days after Zona was buried, Mrs Heaster
had what is sometimes characterized as four dreams, also sometimes

(11:49):
described as some other event in which her daughter appeared
to her. These became very significant events uh. Mrs Heaster
describes them as her daughter being real and corporeal and
able to be touched. And that first night, Mrs Easter
felt that she had awakened when she heard a noise
in her room, and as her eyes grew accustomed to
the darkness, she made out the shape of her daughter Zona.

(12:13):
But when Mary reached out on that first night, her
daughter disappeared On the second night, after Mary prayed repeatedly
that she wanted to see Zonah again, she said that
the deceased daughter appeared to her again, and this time
the apparition spoke to her, wanting her mother to understand
what had really happened. Zona made a third appearance on

(12:33):
the following night, and then a fourth the night after that,
and it was during that final night that Zona really
told her mother all of the details of her death.
The most significant part of Mary Heaster's account of Zonah's
dream communications with her involved details of the murder, specifically
how Trout had broken her neck. Mrs Easter did not

(12:55):
keep these communications from Zona to herself. She told people
all about it. They're initial reaction to Mary telling friends
and neighbors about these dreams and subsequent suspicion of her
son in law's involvement in Zona's death was pretty polite disbelief.
The general opinion seemed to be that grief was leading
Mrs Hoister to come to wild conclusions and to just

(13:17):
cling to some sort of explanation for her daughter's untimely death,
one that would offer her a chance at some kind
of retribution. But Mary Heister was adamant that her daughter
was actively communicating with her, so much that she started
to convince people that that was what was happening. A
few people at a time, and once Mary convinced her
brother in law, Johnson Heister, things really started to change.

(13:41):
So first the pair actually went to visit Shoe. They
were trying not to tip their hand, but they wanted
to talk about what had happened when Zona died, and
they came away from that visit believing with certainty that
he had killed his young wife. They also spoke to
Anderson Jones and several other people in the community d
who had been at the house the day Zona's body

(14:02):
was discovered. With Johnson's involvement and not nearly that of
a distraught mother who people were happy to kind of
write off, the Easters were able to move their suspicions
into action. First, they met with John A. Preston, who
was the Louisbourg prosecutor who had already heard plenty of
rumors going on about Zona's mother trying to have Trout

(14:22):
convicted for murder. As news had spread, various people offered
up examples of what they perceived after the fact. Who
have been strange behavior on Trout's part and the fact
that he had been unwilling to let Dr Nap examine
Zonah's head started to seem less like a deeply aggrieved
husband who could not bear to let go of his

(14:43):
last beloved and maybe more like somebody who was trying
to cover something up. After meeting with Mary and Johnson, Heaster,
Preston took things to the next step. He went to
speak with Dr Napp, and Dr Napp admitted that he
might have been wrong in ruling Zona's death a heart failure.
He mentioned that in the moment, and not thinking with
any sort of suspicious thoughts, he had seen Trout as

(15:06):
a man in shock, and he didn't want to press
the matter to examine Zona's body more thoroughly. Preston and
Nap came to the conclusion that the only way to
truly learn the facts the case was to autopsy Zona's body,
and the two of them gathered Anderson Jones and Aunt
Martha Jones and Trout to the next morning. They informed
to that they intended to exhume Zona, and then the

(15:28):
entire party made their way to the grave site. Trout
was insistent that they would find nothing. He said that
over and over throughout the remainder of this story. Uh
When they reached the grave, several men who lived nearby
were ordered by the prosecutor to assist and dig up
the coffin, and once it had been removed from the ground,
it was taken to a nearby schoolhouse for examination. And

(15:50):
Shoe and Anderson Jones both witnessed the autopsy. So we
should have a quick sidebar here about Anderson Jones, because
he was eleven and watching an auto popsy. It also
seems like he was used as kind of a pawn
to discover Zona's body, and this is because of an
element of racism that was here Trout Shoe was white

(16:11):
and Anderson was black. And back in tween, the American
Psychological Association's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology featured a
study from U. C. L A that stated, quote, children
in most societies are considered to be in a distinct
group with characteristics such is innocence and the need for protection.
Our research found that black boys can be seen as

(16:32):
responsible for their actions at an age when white boys
still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.
That is, of course, not a new thing, even though
that research was conducted five years ago, and I think
it's fair to assume that Anderson was probably not treated
with the care and concern for his well being that
a white child probably would have received. Um. That is

(16:54):
something that does not come up very often when you
hear about this story. People will mention that the ownes
as were black, but they will not really nobody really
addresses the fact that, like, this child was in the
middle of all of this potentially very disturbing stuff. And
even when he talks about finding the body, which he
did many years later, he sort of says like, I

(17:14):
don't I don't know how I did it. I don't
know how I reached down and shook her because it
was clear she was dead, And he doesn't really speak
at length about his experience with the autopsy. It's almost
like he compartmentalizes. Tracy and I talked about this beforehand,
and it's like there is that thing where like in
in country communities, kids that grow up in the country
or in rural areas around farms are often exposed to

(17:37):
things that city kids would not be, some of which
might uh seem a little bit gruesome. I grew up
on a farm. I watched animals get slaughtered. I think
my Again, it's a different time period, obviously, but I
think my parents would not have been cool with me
seeing a human person be autopsied or dissected. But it's

(17:57):
one of those things that um is not just gust
as we said, but it just seems like it would
be remiss not to call attention to that particular angle
of the whole thing, at least briefly, and just make
it something that people think about. We'll get back to
what happened after Zona's body was autopsy, but first we
will take a breather for a little sponsor break. Over

(18:23):
the course of the next three days, Dr Nap carefully
examined the body and eventually found that Zona's neck had
been snapped, and in fact, it was broken in exactly
the place that Mary Heaster had described. That was the
place that Zonah told her it had been broken. Trout
was arrested, charged with murder, and put on trial. The
pocahon Iss Times reported the story of the exlimation and

(18:44):
the horrific findings of the autopsy. Quote on the throat
were marks of fingers, indicating that she had been choken.
That the neck was dislocated between the first and second vertebrae.
The ligaments were torn and ruptured. The wind pipe had
been crushed at a point in front of the neck.
Trout's defense, led by William Parks Rucker and James P. D. Gardner,

(19:06):
actually decided that in the midst of the trial they
would call Mary Heaster to the stand. They thought it
was going to help their case. Their strategy was to
show that she was clearly a grieving mother, out of
touch with reality due to the shock and sorrow of
losing her daughter. But she was very steadfast in her testimony,
and that approach failed miserably. When the defense asked her, quote,

(19:28):
I have heard that you had some dream or vision
which led to this post mortem examination, she replied, quote,
they saw enough their selves without me telling them. It
was no dream. She came back and told me that
he was mad that she didn't have no meat cooked
for supper. But she said she had plenty, and said
that she had butter and apple butter apples, and named

(19:50):
over two or three kinds of jellies, pears and cherries
and raspberry jelly. And she says, I had plenty. She says,
don't you think that he was mad and just took
down all my nice things and packed them away and
just ruined them. And she told me where I could
look down back of Aunt Martha Jones, is in the
meadow in a rocky place that I could look in
a cellar behind some loose plank and see it was

(20:12):
a square log house. It was hued up to the square.
And she said for me to go look right at
the right hand side, at the door as you go in,
and at the right hand corner as you go in. Well,
I saw the place just exactly as she told me,
and I saw blood right there where she told me,
And she told me something about that meat. Every night
she came just as she did the first night. She

(20:33):
came four times and four nights. But the second night
she told me that her neck was squeezed off at
the first joint, and it was just as she told me. So, Um,
that is a little bit different than the version of
progression that we mentioned earlier, in terms of like her
coming the first night in disappearing and then coming the
second night in the fourth night being the one. I

(20:54):
included both of those, and part of that is is
something we're going to talk about at the very end
of the episode about how much this story has become
a legend and it has shifted, and even when you're
looking at historians documents and accounts of people there in
the midst of it, because there's a book written about
forty years after all of this took place, and and
accounts of the surviving people involved were interviewed. It's just

(21:18):
very interesting to me to hear how even though Mrs
Heaster was was pretty adamant about the whole thing throughout
those facts, and I have to use the air quotes
there change a little bit in the telling, even by
people who were first hand witnesses to the whole thing.
The questioning of Mrs Heaster went on to ask her
repeatedly if she really saw her daughter, eventually posing the

(21:39):
possibility that these visions may have been quote nothing more
or less than four dreams founded upon your distress. But
Mary Jane Heaster replied confidently and repeatedly that these were
not mere dreams, but true visitations from her daughter's ownA.
When trout she took the stand, he stayed there for
almost an entire day. He denied everything any witness had

(21:59):
said it against him. He rambled on in a lot
of detail about odd particulars of his life that weren't
really directly related to the case, and told the jury
that he truly loved his wife. He asked them to
look into his eyes and then decide if he was guilty,
and he came off very poorly, so much so that
when the Greenbrier Independent reported on his testimony, the article

(22:21):
insisted that the jury had to find him guilty. Yeah
that that peace came out very quickly. They were essentially
running like real time extras to cover the case because
the jury only had a pretty short deliberation. They came
back that same day and they returned a guilty verdict
with a recommendation of life imprisonment. And while most of
the community agreed that he was guilty, imprisonment rather than

(22:43):
the death penalty was seen as a miscarriage of justice
by many. A vigilante mob formed to storm the county
jail and hang Shoe before he could be transferred to
the penitentiary, but the sheriff interceded and talked them out
of their plan. Edward Trout Shoe was moved by train
to the Mounds Built Penitentiary and he died there in
March of nineteen dred. So again, this is one of

(23:06):
those historical stories whereas I was just saying, the details
get fudged or shifted around pretty frequently. Some of that
is simply because original records of things like births and
deaths from that time are not always available, and also
because some records have simply been lost, and as I said,
firsthand accounts shift. We talked about this on the show
all the time that, especially four decades later, people are

(23:26):
going to tell the story maybe a little differently than
they were telling it at the time that it was
actually going on. But the inaccuracy of reporting on this
case was actually happening from the very beginning. So here's
the brief ride up of the murder and the trial,
as reported by the Baltimore American on July under the
headline mother in Law's visions as evidence quote. Some time ago,

(23:49):
the wife of E. S. Shoe was found dead in
her home. A coroner's jury rendered a verdict death by
heart disease. Neighbors were not satisfied, and the woman's body
was exhumed at her was found broken. She was indicted, convicted,
and sentenced to the penitentiary for life. The principal evidence
was that if she was mother in law who testified
that her daughter's spirit had come to her at a

(24:10):
seance and said she had killed her by breaking her neck,
all other evidence was purely circumstantial. So while the broad
strokes of that account are correct, uh, the mention of
the neighbors initiating the investigation and the appearance of Zona
at a seance stand out as problematic and incorrect, And
even the framing of the case as an instance of

(24:31):
a ghost's account convicting a murderer isn't really accurate. The
markings and damage to Zona's neck and shoes odd behavior
probably went farther in the jury's decision than Mrs heasters testimony,
even though it was her insistence that catalyzed the re
examination of the case. This is one that I love
this story because even though it is not pleasant, UH,

(24:55):
it's a good example of of where factual history and
mytho g start to become a very blurry space together.
Because it is one of those things that's like a
classic ghost story of West Virginia, and it gets told
in a lot of different ways. One thing that also
comes up all the time when you're reading it is
that Sho died eight years later in prison, but his

(25:17):
death is reported as nineteen hundred, which is only three
years later. I don't know if that's just a record
where three looked like an eight. Someone ran with it
and everybody else picked it up. That kind of stuff
happens all the time. Yeah, it's it's why we always
encourage everybody to, you know, really look at any account
of any event in history. Uh, just with a sense

(25:39):
of knowing that you know, primary sources are your best.
But even then, like we said, interviews with with people
who were there at the time aren't always accurate and
they don't always reflect the exact same details, especially when
they're conducted a lot later, as was the case some
of the ones in this story. Uh So that is
the Greenbrier ghost, who's fascinating uh and a good a

(26:02):
good ghost story for Halloween, but also a good example of, uh,
the scariness of how information can get cloudy and change
pretty rapidly in the historical record. Uh So, hopefully that
was an enjoyable ride. Um, I have a listener mail
that I love from our listener and uh Chris Deer,
Holly and Tracy. I was delighted by your double podcast

(26:24):
on the history of commercial aviation in the United States.
Is a huge fan of John Hodgment and an aviatrix
I was. It was a double whammy for me. I
am a pilot at a major US airline headquartered in Atlanta,
and I especially appreciated your nod to the female pioneers. Unfortunately,
female pilots still only make up less than five percent
of pilots holding an Airline Transport Certificate a t P.

(26:46):
That's the certificate needed to fly large transport jets. Hopefully
the statistic will continue to improve. Besides having the ultimate
office with a view, my favorite part of my job
is the unique benefit of being able to see the
world with my family. Every time we set out on
a new adventure, I check your archives to see if
I can find any podcast relevant to where we are
in the world. We decided to check out the Alhambra

(27:06):
because of stuff you missed in history class, and Ephesus
is on the top of our list. Your overview with
John about the medallion points structure was especially helpful to me,
as most of US pilots are completely oblivious to how
it works. This was disappointing to my next door neighbor
who has gold medallion status who regularly brates me about
changes to his medallion status, that I should probably say
something to someone at headquarters about the medallion policy. I

(27:29):
will get right on that. Thanks for all you do.
She also sent us a video about Delta's annual what's
called wing. It's women Inspiring the Next Generation flight and
that was just featured on the Today Show, which is
really cool. Um, it is interesting. It's one of those
things that I know. I still when I am on
a flight, which is frequent, if the captain comes on

(27:51):
to make an announcement and it's a woman, I'm like, hey,
it's a woman. Like it's still notable enough that it
pretty clearly illustrates exactly what she's saying. It is a
very very tiny portion of the pilots in the year
that are women, so and is one of those people
still changing it. Uh. That sounds like a job that
I would be terrified to do, but I'm sure glad
people do. If you would write to us, you could

(28:12):
do so at History Podcast at house works dot com.
You can also find us everywhere on social media as
Missed in History and Missed in History dot Com is
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and visit us there. If you would like to subscribe
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(28:34):
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